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Thee, worthy lord, I will not call a demigod, for thou art a full god, and in future thou wilt not forget a poor, faithful servant, whose needs it will be necessary to provide for from time to time, for once he is sunk in books, he thinks of nothing else; some few stadia of garden land and a little house, even with the smallest portico, for coolness in summer, would befit such a donor.
And yet, because Metrodorus went down one day from the city as far as the haven of Piraeus, taking a journey of forty stadia to assist Mithres a Syrian, one of the king of Persia's court who had been arrested and taken prisoner, he writ of it to every one and in all his letters, Epicurus also highly magnifying and extolling this wonderful voyage.
Farther to the west the dimensions increase; the tumulus of the king Alyattes, father of Croesus, in Lydia, was six stadia, and that of Ninus was more than ten stadia in diameter. In the north of Europe the sepulchre of the Scandinavian king Gormus and the queen Daneboda, covered with mounds of earth, are three hundred metres broad, and more than thirty high.
I had already been told in AEgina of the great dirtiness and number of vermin prevalent in the Piraean inns, and had been warned against passing a night there; but what was to be done? for we could not venture to leave the town without permission of the police. 22nd October. The distance of the harbour of the Piraeus from Athens is thirteen stadia, or six English miles.
Now the largest of the zones into which a passage was cut from the sea was three stadia in breadth, and the zone of land which came next of equal breadth; but the next two zones, the one of water, the other of land, were two stadia, and the one which surrounded the central island was a stadium only in width. The island in which the palace was situated had a diameter of five stadia.
His geography, in the most important particular of the relative distances of places, is rendered of very little utility or authority, from the circumstance pointed out and proved by D'Anville, that he indiscriminately reckons eight stadia to the mile, without reference to the difference between the Greek and Roman stadium.
This distance, we have already mentioned, was 46,300 stadia; which, according as the different kinds of stadia are calculated upon, will give respectively the latitude of the south of Greenland, of the north of Iceland, or of the west coast of Jutland; or, in other words, the limit of Pytheas' voyage will be determined to be in the same latitude, whether we ascertain it by the average length of the day and night's sail of the vessels of the ancients, or by the distance from the equator which he assigns to Thule.
He speaks, however, of "more recent measurements," referring in particular to that adopted by Posidonius, according to which the circumference is only about one hundred and eighty thousand stadia. Posidonius, we may note in passing, was a contemporary and friend of Cicero, and hence lived shortly before the time of Strabo.
The great temple of Zeus Olympius, commenced by Peisistratus and completed by Hadrian, the largest ever dedicated to the deity among the Greeks, was four stadia in circumference. It was surrounded by a peristyle which had ten columns in front and twenty on its sides.
The fact is that all our information on the islands prior to the Portuguese occupation comes from the Periplus of Nearchus. Eratosthenes, a naval officer of Alexander's, states that the Gulf was 10,000 stadia long from Cape Armozum, i.e.
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